As mentioned in early chapters, the focus of this book is primarily on information-seeking. However, because chatbots were one of the first domains where significant progress was made to a more open-domain NL interaction, we briefly review several popular chatbots whose primary goal was to serve as AI companions. Overall, the literature and industry demonstrate a trend toward bots that blend together various functions of retrieval, recommendation, chit-chat, and task-completion. Increasingly, there is a belief among practitioners that conversational systems most demonstrate both EQ (emotional quotient) and IQ (intelligent quotient). The demonstration of a “personality” can play a critical role in user acceptance of the system – our discussion of Microsofts's XiaoIce [1]} highlights some of the reasons why this belief is gaining popularity. Thus, understanding the history of different chatbots can help current designers and researchers regardless of the primary goals of the system. In this section we review a brief history of well-known chatbots over time as further background for making design decisions.
